Oculus Hoping Free Rift Becomes (Non-Virtual) Reality

Share this:

Eventually, virtual reality might actually become even better than plain old, crusty dusty regular reality, but that day is still quite a ways off. Problems range from motion sickness to a jarring inability to put saddles on ant lions and feed them apples while telling them all of our secrets, but mainly there is the issue of money. Reality – minus taxes, living expenses, and everything else you’ll ever work to earn in your entire life – is free. Oculus Rift, meanwhile, will probably run you somewhere in the realm of $300. Actually, you know what? Maybe virtual reality is already better. But even so, the mighty void conjurers at Oculus want to take price tags out of the equation entirely.

“The lower the price point, the wider the audience. We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We’d love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won’t be that in the beginning. We’re targeting the $300 price point right now but there’s the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies.”

“You can imagine if Microsoft and Sony can go out and subsidise consoles because there’s enough money to be made on software and other areas, then there’s the potential that this, in partnership, could get subsidised. Let’s say there was some game you played in VR that everybody loved and everybody played and we made $100 a month – or even $10 a month – at some point the hardware’s cheap enough and we’re making enough that we could be giving away the headset.”

The goal, then, is to ultimately give the gift of Oculus Rift away for free, and the company’s apparently thinking about the logistics “all the time”.

I certainly can’t complain about a company wanting to hand out a rather remarkable product for zero million moneydollars, but I do wonder how much this is an immediate aim versus a pie-in-the-furthest-reaches-of-space pipe dream. Time will tell. For now, though, I suggest more manageable short-term goals: for instance, subsidizing my plan to glue increasingly ridiculous mounds of googly eyes to the front of my friends’ Rifts and create the most successful YouTube channel of all time.

66 Comments

This mainly illustrates the fact that they know how the VR revolution is to succeed: get it in every household as soon as possible. Having a dev kit, I can’t imagine this not being the kind of gear any core gamer wants to have in the next few years. It has the potential to change the gaming landscape drastically, and it probably will.

I understand your skepticism, but if you have any interest in Virtual Reality or its possibilities you have to open your mind.

I’m going to make a quick reference to how computers evolved from vacuum tubes… ok right there all done with that reference…

This may not be the most perfect VR peripheral ever, but I can’t remember a product that hit that deep into new territory without getting some legs, first. What the Oculus Rift prototype has done by simply placing it over the eyes is convince non-gaming middle-aged people’s brains that they are experiencing something different from what’s directly in front of them (ref: link to youtube.com) (ref: link to youtube.com)

It’s incredibly easy to dismiss new [anything] without giving it a fair shake, and the very start of VR is going to have a lot of first-glance detractors like Andy that have a difficult time understanding this technology.

Any VR enthusiast has no need to worry, though. Like thousands of other non-developer gamers I’ve also pre-ordered the Developer’s Kit just to experience it that much faster and have no regrets. Word of mouth and shared experiences are all this tech needs.

We even have the whales who spend tenmillions of moneydollars for cosmetic trinkets like impressionist paintings.

Seriously, though, the important thing is open source. We need each VR headset to work with the same things. That said, Microsoft and Sony will only pony up for “free” units if the users get tied-in to buying MS and Sony products as a result.

MS should replace the bundled-Kinect with a bundled-Oculus Rift and finally win everyone back over to their side in the console war. Unless Sony does it first and still keeps it @ $400. That’d be funny.

Not gonna happen. OR is useless for NSA, while Kinect is a closest thing to the ultimate surveillance tool. They’d do everything they can to encourage people buying it and forbidding microsoft from bundling any other products with Xbone.

The Rift will be most practical with hydra-style motion controllers, where you can still move around with joysticks, and most immersive with omni treadmills, that are too large and expensive for mainstream use.

In all actual facts, the omni treads are less immersive for most. As your walking, but getting no motion perception (not moving forward) from your inner ear. That’s jarring. No idea if it can be trained away as we do with other game play elements (pressing buttons to “jump” etc).

I’d actually settle for the OR + something like a leap motion. Since it tracks your hands in a way that means they can be rendered within the 3D space of the game, it’s not hard to imagine, say, a mech sim or racing game where you can interact with the in-cockpit virtual controls to make it go. The hydra is expensive and not nearly as elegant as simply moving your virtual hands to the virtual button by moving your real hands.

No tactile feedback, mind, but I think that’s something we’re going to be getting used to either way.

Whatever. I don’t care which way they’ll achieve it – as long as a movements of my head are translated to the head movement of an in-game character. That’s one of the most essential things to decrease a level of confusion for a brain making this whole toy by far more usable.

The consumer version will have 1080p, and higher resolution mobile screens than that simply don’t exist right now.

Maybe they will, by the time the 1080p screen drops in price enough that they can give the thing away for free, but even then, it’s not certain, after all mobile manufecturers have no reason to develop 4K mobile screens, and Oculus can’t fund it’s own screen development.

Yes, only I watch my mobile from ~50cm which gives somewhere between 18-15 degrees field of view. (18 deg. if you look up close). Now… Oculus Rift got field of view of… roughly 110 degrees? that’s over 6 times more!
So to be comparable with smartphone it’d need to offer resolution that’s much higher than 4k to start with!
But even going for 2-3k resolution would do for a beginning.

Yeah, but like I said, Oculus can’t invent it’s own screens. If mobile manufacturers have no reason to invest in it themselves, then no one will.

Maybe several years from nov, when VR itself is a mainstream industry, Oculus and it’s competitors will fund their own hardware improvement, but for a long time, it has to exist as an externality of the mobile industry.

Well… yes and no. VR goggles existed years before first color smartphones were released, so there’s no real correlation between these two.
It just happened that for low-budget applications smartphone LCDs are a best way to go. But in no way it needs to be like that. Especially when it comes to high-end version.

“it’d need to offer resolution that’s much higher than 4k to start with”
Actually, no, it doesn’t, because here’s the thing – only a small portion of our field of view is capable of perceiving any real detail. Smart VR systems use lenses to fill in our peripheral vision using a small number of pixels. Our vision there isn’t good enough to notice a difference. So most of the display’s pixels can be used for the portion of human vision that can actually see them. I believe Oculus works this way as well.

You may be on the brink of exploring Tamriel in person and getting pinballed around by a giant’s club, stabbing a sniper hunched up on the battlements of 2fort in the buttcheeks, ripping the Rift off in panic because you took one step too far in Mirror’s Edge and tumbled off the building.. and your concern for getting one is the wife-acceptance-factor?!

Oldest marketing trick in the book. Everyone says “we’d give our product to you for free if we could! But of course we can’t.” It’s making a claim that you can’t possibly follow through on, but there’s no way for people to “prove” you wrong.

I can’t decide whether this would be a great idea or a horrible one. On the one hand, it would create a huge audience demanding Rift support. On the other, it would cost developers more to provide that Rift support. The price of games would have to go up.

As a consumer, I guess I’d end up paying for the thing sooner or later. I generally prefer paying a fixed, up-front price, so I’ll vote no to this.

And that’s even before we consider competing products that will eventually make it to market.

What he’s saying makes pretty good business sense, especially if you consider that many of the games we play are moving toward a subscription basis. As soon as you have subs, you have regular income and regular income in any business is better than volatile income because it is easily to predict cash flow.

I also think this is a wise vision to have and not a cheap marketing ploy. If you aim to partner such that the cost of the hardware is bundled, you are then investing the platform as a whole; the more headsets there are, the bigger the market for games devs. The more games support it, the more headsets will be required. You can give that positive feedback a kick by bundling the hardware – like the Xbone is doing with Kinect (although that’s a more captive market).

[Edit] I’d buy one, when the price reduces, I wont play everything with it but it would be great to feel more connected to the 3D worlds I inhabit.[/Edit]

Sounds like they want to give the hardware away at a discount but charge developers a license to use the device in their games. Not sure if that’s a winning formula considering the somewhat niche market, but it could work out.

It would definitely limit widespread adoption, something that has sunk other computer peripherals. How many developers want to pay a license fee on top of the added development cost of providing support on the off chance that some portion of players will be more likely to buy the game if it has Rift support?

As somebody who has been trying to find an affordable, actual quality VR headset for ages, I was absolutely thrilled when news of the OR started appearing. And appearing. And appearing. And appearing some more, always with some other new “dream” or “fantasy” end goal attached to the news.

What consistently failed to appear was an actual, buyable, HD unit on an actual shelf somewhere.

I’d settle for that right now, even if it has a price tag.

I remain thrilled by the prospect of an actual HD OR and wish the brilliant young man all of the best with his endeavor, but for now I find myself greeting yet another “OMG, the OR which by the way still can’t be played in actual games, much less be bought in stores, will have another fantastic feature if, when, or wherever it might one day, presumably, in a future far far away or closer than we think, we still don’t know, become an actual THING” with a yawn and a shrug.